At the time of writing I have five games of chess on the go – which is five more than I played all of the previous month. Having Shredder on my Mac (as previously discussed) didn’t prove a big enough incentive to play as much as I had hoped. For whatever reason playing against the computer didn’t have the appeal: victories and losses both felt kind of hollow.

Coincidently, there’s been some chess talk around the office lately: a number of people, casual players like me, independently mentioning the game and expressing an interest in setting a board up at some point. I even bought a little magnetic set to keep at my desk, but it’s proved too busy at work to use it yet.

So when a notification dropped into my inbox this week from Chess.com thanking me for being a member for 1 year, I took it as a sign. To be honest I’d forgotten I’d ever signed up for a (free) account. I logged in from that notification and found I’d never even filled in my details, let alone played a game. It’s an impressive site. I used to play a fair amount of Chess online at Yahoo Games in the late 90s, and in some ways the set-up is similar–easy to use interface, chat functionality etc.–but layered on top are a huge amount of chess resources and tools, as well as an impressively passionate and active community.

Thanks to both the huge number of people (of all standards) playing, and the site’s tools, it’s also a wonderful place to learn the game. Analysis functionality, an in-depth tactics trainer, daily columns written by titled players, and news from around the world of chess–as well as live and archived video coverage of tournaments–are all available to allow you to get as immersed in the game as you choose to. It’s now a pinned tab in Chrome for me, and the app is installed on my iPod Touch so I can take games with me, and mull them over on the train.

On my Chess.com profile I’ve stated that I’m there to learn both chess and humility – and I’m not kidding. My eventual hope is to get better at the game, maybe even to become good, but the starting point is just to play more. To play a lot. When I look at the site’s detailed stats pages for now I’m less interested in my win/loss ratio than I am in the number of games played; the hours spent.

If you’re interested in a game or two please look me up as andthenpatterns.

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Actually, chess seems to have been everywhere this week.

One of several books I’ve dipped into on my Kindle recently is Endgame, Frank Brady’s recent biography of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer. Having read a third of the book I’ve learnt a lot about Fischer’s childhood, his introduction to chess, and how he developed his game.

The ‘game of the century’, one of the formative incidents of Fischer’s early career, also cropped up in this week’s Radiolab podcast (which, as always, is pretty much essential listening), alongside general discussion about chess in general.

Chess even played a central role in one of the third season episodes of The West Wing that we watched a couple of days ago.